BERLIN 
Voters inflicted losses on Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives in state elections Sunday, a setback weeks before a national election that she hopes will produce a new center-right government.

Merkel's center-left rival in the Sept. 27 national ballot, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, celebrated her party's "dramatic losses" and said the results show the election remains open. But his own Social Democrats, who trail in national polls, performed weakly.

Steinmeier also faces awkward questions about whether his party enters regional alliances with the opposition Left Party, with which he has pledged to form no national government.

Voters chose new state legislatures in Saarland, on the French border; and in Thuringia and Saxony, in the formerly communist east. All three currently have governors from Merkel's Christian Democrats, which remained the strongest party.

However, results showed it slumping to 34.5 percent of the vote in Saarland from 47.5 percent five years ago; and from 43 percent to 31.2 percent in Thuringia.

That deprived the conservatives of decade-old majorities in the two states and also left them unable to form center-right coalitions. Saarland Governor Peter Mueller could be dislodged by a left-wing alliance after the Left Party powered into the legislature in his state, as might Thuringia's Dieter Althaus.

The picture was much brighter for Merkel's party in Saxony, where Governor Stanislaw Tillich kept its support stable. He can now end a "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats and instead govern with the center-right Free Democrats.

That mirrors what Merkel hopes to achieve in the national election.

The votes should liven up an anemic national campaign, in which Merkel so far has maintained a double-digit poll lead over Steinmeier's party without appearing to break sweat.